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    Chinese Patents Upgrade Beijing Winter Olympics Training


    11/15/2021|INSIGHTS

    Updated: Oct 20, 2021 Source: China IP News

    Public interest in snow and ice sports has increased recently as the international testing contest - the last test before the opening of the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games - kicked off. Are the Chinese skiers ready?

    Record, build models to optimize moves.

    A freestyle aerial move, a combination of skiing and air twisting skills, can be broken down to four steps skiing for acceleration, take-off, air flip and landing. For this reason, performing steady and fluid air moves and landing successfully are crucial for athletes to achieve high scores. Accordingly, recording and analyzing training data is essential.

    Therefore, a team led by Wang Xin, professor of Shenyang Sport University, has participated in a nation-backed special project titled "Research on core technologies to improve athlete's skills in winter events" with a focus on finding a model for balancing training, in an effort to provide training solutions for Freestyle Aerials event.

    "Given the special training needs of these winter athletes such as size of training ground and low outdoor temperatures in winter, our team chose to record by integrating the use of inertial sensors and multiple Gopro cameras after numerous tests, allowing us to collect their training data," Wang said. For this reason, the team has developed technologies including capturing the body motion postures and analyzing the body moment of inertia and has submitted the applications for invention patents including one titled "A technology to evaluate and test basic body sports abilities by use of the vamp sensor technology", which has been endorsed by several national team coaches including Li Ke, Yue Haitao, Dai Shuangfei and Ou Xiaotao.

    AI evaluation to improve training efficiency.

    In addition to recording and analyzing athletes' performance through videos, accurate evaluation of contests also helps.

    Xiaoice company won the bid for a key project of the Winter Sports Management Center of the General Administration of Sport of China (GASC) last December, providing a visual scoring system for the Freestyle Aerials event.

    The system named AI scoring system on competitive sports for international events, is equipped with four functional modules including enhancing sports cognition, improving foul postures, customizing personal coaching and personalizing user profiles to provide target detection, tracking and recognition functions. This system has created an original sports analysis model based on the characteristics of Freestyle Aerials by using various AI visual analysis technologies, which could cope with the special competition scenes of Olympic Games including the complex background of blazing lights, ultrashort air duration for athletes and site constraints of competitive events and trace the training trends.

    AI technology has played an emerging role in competitive sports. From this, Xiaoice will continue to conduct the independent research and development, so that AI can empower more scenes and fields, and bring innovative fruits from competitive sports to public sports, according to a Xiaoice executive.

    VR simulation to provide simulative training.

    In Alpine Skiing events, the change of natural environment on the competition day will have certain impacts on the athlete's performance and competition results. According to the competition procedures, each team will have only one day to test on the competitive course before the official competition of Winter Olympics. The short test time makes it difficult for athletes to get familiar with the venue quickly. Therefore, how to employ technology to simulate the real arena environment?

    To this end, Shenyang Sport University led a key special project named "Integration of key technology of summer and winter transfer training on snow and latent advantage projects" as a part of the national plan "Technological Winter Olympics". In addition, a team led by Wang Hong, professor at the Institute of Mechatronics Engineering, Northeastern University, has participated in this project and integrated robot, IoT, VR and VI technologies and would later file applications for invention patents including one named "A portable intelligent robot to automatically measure snow surface friction coefficient". They have developed an Alpine Skiing experience system based on dynamic environment elements that can help athletes simulate in advance to better adapt to the competitive environment.

    Regarding their next step, the team will focus on solving the problem of autonomous movement and positioning to make the equipment more intelligent and automatic, providing better services for the Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics, according to Wang Hong.

    Nowadays, endless innovative technologies have provided a strong technical support for athletes' tech-based training for the Beijing Winter Olympics. In recent years, with the successful bid for the Beijing Winter Olympics, skiing has become more popular year by year, with times of skiing per head reaching 1.6 in 2020, according to the Report on the Supply and demand Situation Analysis and Market Operation Potential of China's Ski Industry from 2021 to 2027 issued by Zhiyan.org. With the help of these powerful patents, skiing athletes will better display their passion and vitality in the coming Olympics.